The Revolution Will Be Messaged
How FireChat, an app for mesh networking, became a tool for rebellion
By Jason Bisnoff
In early October the city of Hong Kong erupted in protests that captivated the world. News outlets flocked to the urban hub in south China to cover the student-led rallies that called for the democracy that the government had promised the people years earlier.
The size and density of the crowds during the protests, which have now continued for more than a month, led to understandable wear on wireless networks. The amount of people with smart phones attempting to tweet, text, call, and post videos on Vine in the city of 7.1 million people led to slowed networks. Sheer overuse, coupled with fears of the government shutting down cell phone towers and wireless connections in an effort to combat the gathered masses, led many involved in the chaos scrambling for a reliable way to communicate. The discovery of an app called FireChat by protestors led to a stunning new practical use for the messenger, revolution.
“What has happened in Hong Kong has been the biggest phenomenon,” said Cristophe Daligault, head of marketing for Open Garden Inc., a California-based startup that created FireChat.
“We’ve seen more than half a million people downloading the app in the past 12 days; we have more than 14 million chats happening in Hong Kong alone; we have seen 1.6 million chat rooms being created and that has happened very quickly.”
Mesh Networking uses the phones built in antenna, which is commonly used for bluetooth connections, to connect devices directly without the use of large cell towers or satellites. This innovative approach to messaging creates optimal efficiency when it comes to messaging within a certain confined distance.
When Open Garden extended their brand to FireChat in March 2014, the idea of mesh networking was still novel and unknown to the general population.
“We saw it being useful at sports stadiums or outdoor music festivals or concerts, that is what we had in mind when we built this app. It was a way for people to communicate when they had limited connectivity,” said Daligault.
“We had no idea it would be used for protests in fact the app is not really designed for that.”
What would happen just over six months later they could never have anticipated.
“This has been great for the company and positioned ourselves as a market leader as far as peer-to-peer mesh networking,” said Micha Bendoliel, CEO of Open Garden. “This also demonstrates the promise of this technology and the power of connecting people when there is no connectivity at all.”
As a start-up company dating back to 2011, the revolutionary yet simple concept of mesh networking was the principal field of innovation of Silicon Valley based Open Garden. The initial concept was so novel it is a wonder that it hasn’t already been introduced as a mainstream form of communication.
As it was described by Daligault; “All mobile devices have little radios that help you connect to wi-fi access points, it also helps you use Bluetooth. We use those transport layers to connect the phones directly with one another.” Though the current range is limited to about 70 meters or 200 feet they are confident that technological advancements will increase that sooner rather than later.
Open Garden founders Micha Benoliel, Stanislav Shalunov, and Greg Hazel have Skype and BitTorrent on their respective resumes and were integral in bringing those three technological powerhouses to their current standing. When they ventured out on their own, the idea of mesh networking was what they chose to tackle but even with their years of experience and success, they couldn’t have anticipated its meteoric rise to success in the infancy months of FireChat.
Prior to the protests, FireChat had several hundred downloads and sessions a day in Hong Kong, within the first 24 hours of protest they had 100 thousand downloads and one million sessions. Comparatively, Twitter had 1.3 million tweets about the protest worldwide in the first four days while FireChat had 2.8 million chat sessions in Hong Kong alone. A tweet is 140 characters and the average FireChat session is three and a half minutes.
After exploding on the scene and being featured in media outlets globally, the key for FireChat and in turn Open Garden is to sustain their success. For this they are looking to the user for feedback and suggestions on how to continue to improve their product.’
As of now the competition on the market is slim. Among the app stores other offerings for Mesh Networking is Serval Mesh, which is far less user friendly, and not much else in the way of messengers. For now FireChat will attempt to prove the value of it’s product that faces the conundrum of being useful in specific conditions when phone signals aren’t reliable but having to be downloaded and set aside while a connection is readily available.
“What we learned in Hong Kong is that we have an app for crowds. They can be at a music festival, a sporting event, a political rally or a disaster area,” said Daligault. “We got tons of feedback from the people of Hong Kong.”
It will surely be tough for FireChat to replicate their quick rise to success and seemingly overnight relevance to one of the world’s biggest hot button issues, but they plan on settling into a place and niche in the technology sector that merges their original intentions according to Daligault, “There are many people coming our way from the world of sports and entertainment they can’t support the peak of usage when there is a big event and understand there is a solution here.”
After being placed on the map with their involvement in the Hong Kong protests, Open Garden continues looking for new uses for the app after stumbling on its most significant application.
“Even though we are getting a lot of news coverage in the context of what is going on in Hong Kong, where we see the lion’s share of adoption and usage is in places like India, Brazil, Mexico where Internet connectivity is unaffordable or unreliable, this is the perfect solution for them.”
For Benoliel it is surreal how quickly things have happened. His time in Hong Kong during October served as a reminder. “I’ve been walking around there and people say to me ‘Thank you, you made history.’ Wow, that is an amazing feeling.”
Benoliel and the rest of Open Garden are looking to capitalize on the publicity found in Hong Kong and continue to use mesh networking in new and profound ways.
“Hong Kong is an important moment in the life of the company but it is just the beginning of what is unfolding which is connecting these billions of people who will have smartphones but won’t have the infrastructure to use the networking capabilities of these devices.”
